Starchitecture on Campus

Students moving into Northeastern University's new Building H may think that they've checked into a Four Seasons hotel instead of a dormitory. Rooms are organized into four-person suites, with private baths, central kitchens, and spacious living rooms with panoramic views of Boston.

Across the river at MIT, Frank Gehry has created a village of tilting towers and swirling atria called the Stata Center that houses the school's computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and linguistics departments.

And at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, students are flocking to a new campus center with the kinetic energy of a pinball machine that features a gigantic light-rail tube on the roof.

These are not isolated examples of architectural jeu d'esprit. Across the country, colleges and universities are emerging as the Medici of innovative design, commissioning bold new work from leading architects at a time when many corporations have lost their creative zip and the public is suffering from an advanced case of retromania. Not every school is riding this wave, of course; there are still plenty of tired, formulaic campus buildings going up. Yet because colleges and universities have access to so much federal money and usually build on land they've owned for decades, they're in a position to take chances that private developers cannot. And they're doing it.

"Starchitecture"

Many of the new dormitories -- and student centers, laboratories, and libraries -- are being designed by celebrity architects who bring prestige and rock-star panache to projects that might otherwise seem utilitarian. It's hardly a new phenomenon. A fellow named Thomas Jefferson did some pretty decent work at the University of Virginia in the early 19th century; McKim, Mead & White left its mark on countless American campuses at the beginning of the 20th; and Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, and Le Corbusier all did academic star turns in Boston and elsewhere after World War II.

But as the competition for students, resources, and a spot in annual surveys of the best colleges and universities intensifies, academic institutions are looking to signature buildings to give them that extra edge.

In the last few years, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has commissioned buildings from Steven Holl, Gehry, Fumihiko Maki, and Kevin Roche, the last three winners of the Pritzker Prize, the Nobel of architecture. The Illinois Institute of Technology, designed in the 1940s and 1950s by modernist icon Mies van der Rohe, has added a new dormitory by Helmut Jahn and the new campus center by Dutch iconoclast Rem Koolhaas, another Pritzker laureate. At the nearby University of Chicago, Ricardo Legorreta and Cesar Pelli, two American Institute of Architects gold medalists, have designed major buildings, as has Rafael Vinoly, runner-up in the recent World Trade Center competition.

For MIT, Chicago, and other elite schools, the issue is less about making a reputation than holding on to one. When you're on top, everyone wants to knock you down, so you can't drop your guard.

"We want our buildings to be as diverse, forward thinking, and audacious as the community they are in," says MIT president Charles Vest. "They should stand as a metaphor for the ingenuity at work inside them." They are what marketers would call a school's brand, the highly visible expression of its precious intellectual capital.

For aspiring institutions farther down the prestige ladder, a stunning new building can energize alums and maybe generate enough buzz for a short feature in Newsweek or one of the national design magazines.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the fledgling University of California, Irvine, vaulted into the national spotlight by hiring Gehry, Robert A. M. Stern, James Stirling, and others to dress up a grand but uninspired master plan. Some of the individual buildings flopped, and the overall image was more architecture theme park than campus, but the program put the school on the map.

In 1996, the University of Cincinnati opened its Aronoff Center for Design and Art -- by the perpetually avant-garde Peter Eisenman -- with a black-tie dinner, followed by concerts and a two-day all-star symposium on the future of American architecture moderated by Charlie Rose and broadcast on PBS.

"We know we can't turn this place into the University of Virginia," said the school's president, Joseph Steger, "but at least this way we can get people to come here just to see what we have." And presumably pull out their checkbooks in the process.

So far, the university has spent more than $500 million on new buildings by Gehry, Michael Graves, I. M. Pei, and other superstars, transforming a once dreary campus into a must stop on any mid-America architecture tour. Some of the excitement has also rubbed off on the city, which recently opened an edgy and provocative contemporary art museum by Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid. So now Cincinnati has both Procter & Gamble and name-brand design.

Campus as Laboratory, Campus as Memory

Universities live by ideas and passionate debate, so it's natural that architects often feel freer and bolder working on a campus than when, say, designing a hotel or a shopping center. What's an avant-garde for if not to shake things up? And what better place to do it than an institution dedicated to intellectual ferment and growth? On the other hand, many people are uncomfortable with the unconventional. They want more of what they know, which helps account for the proliferation of pseudo-Georgian subdivisions and unabashedly nostalgic architecture on American campuses.

MIT is a meritocracy where what you do is usually more important than whom you know, and its architecture reflects that. From Aalto's Baker House dormitory in the 1940s to Saarinen's chapel and auditorium in the 1950s and Pei's earth-science building in the 1960s, the school has a distinguished history of progressive design. Recent work by Holl and others extends that legacy.

Simmons Hall, Holl's gigantic steel-and-concrete trellis on Vassar Street, is a bold experiment in community building, sparked by the 1997 fraternity-party death of a first-year student. In the wake of the tragedy, Vest ruled that all freshmen would live on campus by 2001. The building's facilities are superb -- fitness center, game room, theater, library, and, weather permitting, outdoor cafe -- as is the structure, a porous 10-story concrete skeleton that the architect claims was inspired by a bath sponge. The "holes," some 5,500 of them, are windows, behind which are various organic spaces that flow from room to room and floor to floor. Although budget problems reduced the size of the rooms, Simmons is as different from a conventional concrete-block dorm as can be imagined.

William Rawn's Building H at Northeastern -- still an upstart institution on the make, by Boston standards -- is an elegantly spare glass tower of crisp details and stunning transparency that gives the university a dramatic new gateway on what used to be a sea of parking lots. But its most innovative feature may be Rawn's combining student apartments on the upper floors with classrooms and labs for the college of computer science on the lower. This integration of activities and disciplines allows students to live and work in the same building, which in turn helps keeps the surrounding neighborhood active and secure around the clock as students go out and about. An old-fashioned, Jeffersonian idea rediscovered.

Harvard University, on the other hand, is an institution of quads, towers, and greens, where a sense of tradition and continuity is ubiquitous and paramount. Except for Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Josep Lluis Sert's Holyoke Center and Peabody Terrace apartments and the controversial One Western Avenue by Machado and Silvetti Associates Inc., its buildings tend to fit in rather than stand out. Hauser Hall at the Law School and Shad Hall at the Business School, both designed by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood of Boston, are sophisticated but respectful variations on the red-brick and hipped-roof vernacular of most of the campus.

More deferential, to the point of obsequiousness, is Stern's Spangler Center at the Business School. Here is the architecture of reassurance raised to the power of 10. The building is a scholarly reprise of adjacent buildings by McKim, Mead & White from the 1920s, right down to the grand staircases and the coffered ceilings. It celebrates inherited values and men's-club culture at a time when many B-school students are boning up on hedge funds and hostile takeovers.

But it is also a lavish expression of a pervasive attitude on many campuses. Yale, Amherst, the University of Virginia, and dozens of other schools are enamored of a time-warp architecture that implies that college life hasn't changed much in 50 or even 100 years. This is an image that many alumni want and are willing to pay handsomely to preserve. Princeton recently hired English architect Demetri Porphyrios to revive the Collegiate Gothic style of its residential quads, while the architecture school at the University of Notre Dame has dedicated itself to reviving the classical tradition in American architecture.

One justification, perhaps, is that many of these campuses were horribly scarred by modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. These were decades in which innovation often meant plopping monolithic concrete boxes in the middle of tranquil lawns, where they conversed only with themselves. No wonder university presidents and trustees started screaming "Anything but modern."

Occasionally, this tension between tradition and innovation erupts into a pitched battle. In 1999, the adventurous Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron designed a new art museum for the University of Texas in Austin, featuring an undulating roof and an elegant metal and glass skin. The university regents revolted, claiming that the design ignored the campus master plan -- which it did and didn't -- and compromised the integrity of the Classical Revival buildings on the old campus. One regent equated flat roofs and glass walls with Bolshevism; another brought in his own architect to show the outsiders what a Classical Revival Spanish Colonial building with a Texas accent should look like.

Following months of angry confrontations, Herzog & de Meuron quit, followed shortly by the dean of the architecture school, who had lobbied hard for the project. The school quickly became a laughingstock in design circles. The commission eventually passed to Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, who have designed an elegant but more stylistically compatible building.

Where the Money Is

If campus architecture is about image, it is also about money -- from students, corporations, foundations, and alums.

"It's hard to quantify the effect of these star buildings on the bottom line," says Catherine Donaher, a Boston planning consultant who works frequently with universities. "There's always a premium for experimental work that you may not recover. On the other hand, if you have an exciting building, a Stata Center, for example, you're in a position to say to a prospective donor, 'You can have your name on this.' People like to be associated with fresh and exciting things, and architecture can be one of them."

Housing can be a windfall for colleges and universities. Students in IIT's State Street Village, designed by Helmut Jahn, live in loftlike apartments with 12-foot ceilings, roof decks, plasma TVs in the lounges, and Internet connections to virtually everything, including the washer-dryers in the basement. For this, they pay $6,200 a year, more than double the cost of a room in one of the original Mies van der Rohe dorms. This works out to $25,000 per year for a four-person suite, about the same price as a nice apartment near the Loop. And there's a long waiting list.

Doubles in Northeastern's Building H go for $3,600 per student, roughly $1,000 more than those in older dorms and enough to put housing in the black in a few years. "When kids are paying $40,000 a year to go to school, you can't just stick them in bunk beds," says Northeastern's chief financial officer, Larry Mucciolo. But the bigger payoff, he says, is attracting and keeping good students: "Our applications are going through the roof, and the housing is one big reason why. Also, the more campus housing you have, the less the neighborhoods scream at you for driving up the rents. It helps keep the peace."

The architectural and technological sophistication of these new dorms reflects seismic shifts in student expectations and institutional priorities.

In the 1970s and 1980s, dorm living was still considered a rite of passage through which students supposedly learned to share, adapt, compromise, and generally prepare themselves for the real world -- even if, for many of them, adulthood began when they moved out of the dorm and into an apartment of their own.

That view is becoming as passe as your father's herringbone sport jacket. In loco parentis is back in the form of dorms that resemble luxury apartments and student centers with many of the attractions of a shopping mall. Middle-class students expect dorm life to be just like home, only better. More privacy, fancier appliances, faster Internet connections. Many have never shared a room with a sibling, much less a total stranger, and they aren't about to start. Privacy, security, comfort, and convenience, this is the undergraduate mantra of the moment.

"Students have become consumers who comparison-shop," says Donaher. "They assume that they can get good history or business courses wherever they go, so they tend to focus on the extras: 'The food is terrific here,' or 'That place has a super fitness center,' or 'I can get into a neat dorm.' It puts tremendous pressure on schools to measure up."

Just as important, says Rawn, is changing sexual mores. "Kids want single rooms with their own bathrooms and locks on their doors so they can entertain whomever they want." But he worries about their not learning to share. "Acculturation is such an important part of college life, and many students are missing out on it."

The only academic buildings drearier than dormitories have been laboratories, with their long, dark corridors and mostly windowless rooms. But they're changing, too, as many of the same celebrity architects -- Gehry, Norman Foster, Pei, Vinoly -- apply their talents to making them more welcoming, uplifting, and profitable places.

"You need these facilities to attract and retain top scientists," says Cambridge architect Harry Ellenzweig, who designed the new Naito-Bauer laboratory building at Harvard. "They're a mobile group, and if you don't create an exciting environment, they'll go elsewhere and take their grant money with them."

The $300 million Stata Center at MIT is a lab in the form of a village, complete with streets, plazas, bridges, and an outdoor amphitheater. The goal is not set design but generating those close encounters of the creative kind that might occur in a lively neighborhood. Like many new labs, Stata is multidisciplinary, housing the school's computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and linguistics departments. The plan reflects the widespread blurring of traditional boundaries among the sciences, as physicists, biologists, and geneticists work side by side.

But the jury is still out on whether high design inspires creativity. Speaking at the dedication of the Vontz Center for Molecular Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Frank Gehry insisted that "scientists can turn out the lights and put a sackcloth around their heads if they want to suffer a little bit, but they are, over time, going to experience a richness."

"It's such a personal thing," countered laboratory designer Earl Walls, "that I'm not sure I could ever say anything but maybe, maybe not."

For perspective, Britain's famous Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, the fountainhead of modern physics, was a grim place, but the nearby tearooms were terrific.

The Shock of the New

Experiments, by definition, don't always work out. Simmons Hall, in many ways an admirable experiment in dormitory life, also came in two or maybe three times over budget. No one at MIT will confirm the figures, but no one is clamoring for another Steven Holl building either.

Gehry's Stata Center is several years behind schedule and an estimated $100 million over budget, though some of the overrun was caused by program changes by the university. Nevertheless, these brouhahas have tarnished MIT's reputation for tight management at a time when its endowment is shrinking.

Peter Eisenman's Aronoff Center at the University of Cincinnati has turned out to be a maintenance nightmare, while his even more celebrated Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, opened in 1989, is undergoing a $12 million renovation to correct serious lighting and moisture problems. Two examples of the perils of trying to build theory, or maybe just not understanding the difference between the academy and the real world.

Critics see such problems as proof that universities should scrap high-flying design and get back to basics. For them, starchitecture is merely a series of one-off stunts -- spasmodic and transient. Defenders, on the other hand, argue that risk taking is one of the missions of a university. If not there, where? Clients get buildings, patrons get architecture, and universities ought to be patrons.

Donna Robertson, dean of IIT's architecture department, says that the new buildings by Jahn and Koolhaas probably saved the historic downtown Chicago campus, which had become so rundown and aesthetically impoverished that the trustees wanted to close it and move to the suburbs. Endowment and enrollment are up, including 100 new students in the architecture program.

"There hadn't been a new building here in 50 years," she explains. "The heart of the campus was a wasteland. Students had no place to get together. We needed some affirmation that we were in the 21st century, and this was it."

Visibility, prestige, a chance to make a difference, these are some of the appeals of campus architecture. But that's not the whole story. There's also the environment, the underlying spirit of the place.

"The people are smart, and there's the opportunity for a challenging intellectual dialogue," says Ellenzweig, who has designed, in addition to Harvard's Naito-Bauer building, the Tang Center at MIT. "Unlike shopping centers and hotels, academic buildings have a real social purpose. They don't merge or move or get sold off like banks and office towers. They're meant to last."

That may be the biggest attraction of all.

David Dillon is the architecture critic for The Dallas Morning News.